Serial interconnects provide means for conveying streams of bits from one component to another. With modern computing devices, high-speed serial interconnects are often used to communicatively couple various components together. For example, a computing device may be coupled to a number of peripheral devices (e.g., display, Ethernet hub, auxiliary storage device, or the like) via one or more high-speed interconnects. Examples of such interconnects are DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, USB, etc.
In general, high-speed serial interconnects provide for conveying information from one component to the other. The information is first coded into digital words (“symbols”) with a fixed size (“frames”) in the transmitter side and then sent, as a serial bit stream, to the receiver side via the interconnect medium. The receiver receives the serial bit stream, synchronizes each frame, and decodes the symbols. Some high-speed serial interconnects do not compress data. For example, modern DisplayPort standards provide adequate bandwidth to support up to 5K display resolutions without compressing the symbol stream. Accordingly, random bit errors may result in corruption of a few pixels per frame, which may be acceptable for particular implementations. However, for compressed symbol streams, random bit errors may result in corruption of the entire frame, which may be unacceptable for particular implementations.